Reawakening
by BiteMeTechie
Summary: Reanimated by the Lazarus Pit and growing accustomed to her new existence tainted by its powers, Nora Fries meets her husband again.


_This story was written for the Free For All Fic For All-or FFAFFA for short-over on the Ask the Squishykins tumblr, wherein Twinings and I offer ourselves up to fill as many fic prompts as humanly possible with stories ranging in length from 100 to 16,000 words. The current round runs until May 7th, 2014, so if you'd like a fic written to your custom specifications, please don't hesitate to drop by and ask for it! :)_

_**Prompt:** "You know how in the comics Nora Fries was resurrected in the Lazarus pits as Lazara, a creature made entirely out of flame? Write Mr. Freeze's wooing of his beloved and fiery wife. Scorched mouths will probably occur."  
_

_**Warnings:** Brief suicidal thoughts, frank discussions of terminal illness; this got a great deal darker than I anticipated. I'm not sure if I'm entirely happy with it, either, so I might tweak it a teensy bit later._

** Extremely Lengthy Notes:** To refresh my memory so I could write this story, I dug up the issues of Batgirl that contain the "Nora's Resurrection" storyline (Batgirl #69 and 70, which are part of the larger _Destruction's Daughter_ arc) wherein the parts of a literally shattered, still-frozen Nora Fries are chucked in a Lazarus Pit and brought back from the dead. She then declares herself Lazara and promptly raises a zombie army while ranting and spitting fire. Basically, while the prompt specifies that Lazara is a creature of flame, it's more complex than that—she's really more of a patched together necromancer who happens to be able to breathe the fires of the Lazarus Pit. Because comics.

My point is, in order to make this story fit with established canon, as well as lend a little depth to Nora's characterization, I've taken some liberties with the prompt itself. I've also tried to make it more accessible for casual comics readers, because I am apparently a masochist who enjoys the taste of failure.

* * *

On snowy nights like this, Nora can still remember that night if she thinks about it very hard. The memories can be sharp and vivid, though they are more often distant and obscured, but she _can_ remember. Sometimes, long after the church bells outside chime midnight, she finds herself closing her eyes and concentrating, reaching for the intangible fragments of memory that feel so far away. The ghost of Victor's fingertips tracing the lines of her palm, her mouth moving to form the words _I love you_, the gentle _shush_ of the stasis tube closing…

And then, cold. Darkness and cold. So much darkness and cold, for so very long.

The snow is six inches deep and still falling when she emerges from the crypt that she's taken refuge in these last few months. Here, among the dead, is where she feels at home now. Isn't that what she is? A corpse? Breathing, yes. Walking and talking, yes. Yet still a reanimated mockery of the vibrant being she once was. Nora opens her hand to receive the snowflakes, watching them wet the scars that crisscross her skin and making them shine silver in the moonlight. She is covered with them, a bitter reminder of where her body was shattered and knitted back together by the power of a Lazarus Pit.

The Lazarus Pit. She makes a fist, crushing the delicate ice crystals in her hand. That, she remembers clearly. The fire racing along the seams where her flesh closed together, the burning pit deep inside her like a red hot coal, the uncontrollable anger and madness…yes, those memories she has no trouble retrieving. Even if she were not a patchwork monster, the abilities thrust on her by its power has kept the incident fresh in her mind. The voices of the dead and worm-eaten echo in her ears, her constant— and only—companions, all of them crying out for release from their prisons made of earth and timber and stone. They beg and cajole and offer secrets that never passed their lips in life to tempt her to let them walk again.

They have no idea what it is to be moving, yet not alive. There is no other reason for them to want this half-life that she would gladly trade for the peace and quiet of their graves, if only she could find a way to die. No one understands what this is, no one except, perhaps, the one man she wishes didn't understand at all.

Victor…

Her eyes drift closed, a smoldering tear escaping from between her lashes. How cruel that she should still love him even as she hates him. She lifts her face, the gentle snowflakes kissing her skin. Thinks about Victor and his pale, frosty skin. She wonders, is this anything close to what it would be like to…?

Nora's eyes snap open, filled with fury and stubbornly unshed tears. She can't afford to think like that anymore. The cold and its reminders of a long ago past will not take her anger from her. Nora will make him pay for this moment of weakness that has lanced her heart.

The snow hisses and melts under her feet, leaving a trail of steaming footprints behind her. She does not know where he is, but he can't be far. From what little she knows of his weapons, the range of this manufactured blizzard is small. It is manufactured, she knows. The swirling wind and white is nothing more than a pathetic plea for her attention, evidence of his desperation to flush her out of hiding.

The earth rumbles under her feet, the vibrations of rebellious skeletons that refuse to stay still rattling in their rotted coffins. The sleeping blades of grass beneath the frost awaken and unfurl their greenery, the powers of the Lazarus Pit forcing them in spite of the weather. He will regret forcing her to come to him this way.

She searches the cemetery, a carpet of living foliage left in her wake. The air grows chillier, the snowfall heavier. An unforgiving wind whips her hair and whites out the world until she can barely see a foot in front of her. Still she forces her way on.

There. The outline of a man, large and imposing in the blizzard. Large, imposing; words that belong to other men, not the meek husband she left behind when she willingly drowned herself in the cold and dark. She struggles toward him, the ground beneath her trembling with her every step.

Nora sees him turn toward her, the glow of his red goggles two pinpoints of color in the snow. She cannot see the expression on his face. Why that makes her angry, she does not know.

Gradually, the blizzard gentles. The snowfall lets up and the winds all but stop. They are face to face, four feet apart.

Nora's eyes blaze, her posture threatening.

"Nora…" His hand reaches for her. She recoils.

"Leave me alone."

"But," he says, his voice soft, "It's your birthday, Nora. I brought the snow for you."

_For you._

Something inside her breaks and splinters apart. It's the surface of her rage that bursts, revealing a tender, bleeding hurt beneath. An old, old hurt, so old she had forced herself to bury it and leave it forgotten.

Nora turns her eyes up to meet his. "You didn't bring it for me."

"Yes," he says, reaching for her again, "yes, I did."

"Victor," her voice shudders with a threatened sob, and she wonders why she cannot find the full force of her anger anymore, "you've never done anything _for me._"

He seems confused by this. She forces her way on.

"Let everyone think of you as the self-sacrificing dutiful husband, the incurable romantic who does everything for his poor sickly wife. Live with that delusion yourself if you want it so badly. But you've never done it for me, Victor. Not really."

Victor takes her in his arms—strong, so strong, too strong to be her Victor. "I did it for you, Nora. I _saved_ you."

"No, Victor," his hands cradling her face are almost too much to bear, "you did it for yourself. Look at me. Look at what you've made me. All because you couldn't bear loneliness anymore. You could have waited. I was fine, Victor. I was safe. I could have waited for the right cure, the cure that wouldn't make me…this! But _you_ couldn't wait."

She extracts herself from his arms and staggers away with her back to him. The hurt within her blossoming and enveloping the anger, joining with it, twisting it and making it into a weapon instead of a wound. A weapon that cuts her heart as she tries to wield it, but a weapon nonetheless.

"It's always been about you, Victor. Never me." Fire sparks from her eyes as she turns to face him. "Even as I was dying, keep on a brave face for Victor, he's working so hard to save you. Don't ask too much of Victor, he takes such good care of you. Don't do anything yourself, Nora, you might get sicker, Nora, let me do that for you, Nora. Never mind that you spent twenty hours of every day in the lab while I lay in bed with nothing to do but think about the fact that I was _dying alone!_ Was it so important for you to not be alone that it was worth forcing me to be?"

The accusations cut him to the quick, she can see. Good. _Good_.

"I needed more from you than meals and a goodnight kiss on the cheek." Tears burn trails down her cheeks. Her chest feels hollowed out. "I was _human_, I was _lonely_, I was _bored_! And I was so tired of 'being strong' for you, never making a fuss when all I wanted to do was scream and cry and beat my fists through walls because it was all so unfair. I spent _years_ wasting away with a man who treated me like spun glass and wouldn't let me live what life I had left, and all the while considering _your_ feelings, but you never considering mine.

"Why, Victor? In the end, what was it all for? You spent years without me after I had spent years without you, and now here we stand, inhuman, as unable to touch as we ever were. Wouldn't it have been better if the years in your lab had been spent _with me_? If you had treated me as a person with feelings and desires of my own and not an object you had to save so it could soothe you?

"What do you think it was like," she cries, "to be so weak that I was trapped in my own body with nothing but my thoughts? You were so absorbed in saving what I represented to you that you forgot the real, living, breathing Nora!"

"Nora, I…"

At last she has no words left, only hot tears and body wracking sobs. She wraps her arms around herself and cries, her body folding until she has fallen to her knees. She did not want to remember this. She did not want to unleash this agony from a lifetime ago. The rage was better, the rage of her new existence, not her festering resentment for events now a decade in the past.

She hears his boots crunch in the snow as he steps away from her. "Nora…" his voice is halting, hesitant, "forgive me. You deserve better than someone as selfish as I have been. You have always been the better of us—"

"Stop it," she whispers harshly, choking it out around a hiccuping sob, "Stop treating me like an ideal. I don't want to be one. All I ever wanted was…" Nora shakes her head. She can't go on, it hurts too much.

"What?"

She can't stand to look up at him, and fights to force herself to stop crying enough to breathe and speak. "All I ever wanted to be was Nora. Not Mr. Freeze's Tragic Nora. Not Poor Terminally Ill Nora. Not Scientific Experiment Nora. _Nora._ Nora who's afraid of spiders. Nora who hates popcorn. Nora who can't put on mascara without getting it in her eyes. Nora who is a _person_, not a beautiful, pitiable accessory and motivation for her husband."

Shaking, she turns her tear streaked face to him. "Can't you remember what I was before I got sick? Can't you treat me the same way? Not as your other half to keep you from being lonely, not your ice princess in a bell jar, but your friend? Your partner? Your _wife_?"

Silence falls between them, thick and uneasy. It lasts for what feels like an eternity.

Then, Victor's hands rise to his helmet and unlock it from its position. He lifts it over his head and kneels in front of her.

"Victor—"

"It is cold enough," he says, dropping it in the snow. His goggles come off and his hands find their way to either side of her face. Victor takes in her features, gaze sweeping from the widow's peak of her hair to her chin, then coming back to meet her eyes. "For all that I did not know and would not see, I am sorry."

Inside, she marvels at how so few words can soothe so much of the pain, how ready she is to forgive him though her every instinct says she shouldn't. The tears begin afresh, but his thumbs sweep them away. "I know."

"How ashamed I am to have forgotten you. You, the flesh and blood Nora, with her anger and her tears and her faults as much a part of the structure of her as her joy." He brushes a lock of her hair aside. "I am a fool."

She finds a faint smile on her face, shaky and tearful, but there. "I know that, too."

What tomorrow will bring and how they will go on from here as the monsters they have become, she does not know. What she will do with the rest of her pain and anger and he the rest of his guilt, she doesn't know either. Nor, right now, does it matter. Let those troubles wait.

His kiss tastes like a winter night.


End file.
